roma★
if i look back, i am lost
tumblr dot com
★
AnasAbdin
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sheepfilms
will byers stan first human second
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Cosmic Funnies
Cosimo Galluzzi
JBB: An Artblog!
titsay
Acquired Stardust
todays bird
🪼
⁂
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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@maklodes
May 17, 2026: first shots of the Second American Civil War are fired, following two months of growing tension after Elon Musk and Matt Gaetz simultaneously attempt to lay claim to the same nubile female for impregnation.
Okay, we avoided this one.
in order to understand hybrid cars you need to understand regular cars
makes the point that the advantages of the hybrid drive train come from:
using a weak engine for fuel efficient cruising, supplemented by battery power only when absolutely needed to accelerate
regenerative braking to charge the batteries
so it's not the same as the diesel-electric locomotive, which trades inefficiency (due to conversion losses) for massive torque (needed to get a heavy train moving).
I would just note that he primarily discusses the Toyota hybrid synergy drive model, with a small diversion to Chevy Volt's series hybrid. The synergy-style system with the two motor generators and the planetary gear eCVT is AFAICT the majority of hybrids, but recently there have been more hybrids which just have a single motor-generator augmenting or charging from the gas engine along with a conventional transmission.
This approach seems to be favored for Hyundai and Kia, as well as I think Mercedes and BMW. Lately Toyota has also been making more single-motor-generator hybrids, with its iForce MAX and Hybrid MAX cars. Toyota seems to regard the one-motor approach as preferable for "performance hybrids," based around "deliver a lot of power but don't be to inefficient" rather than "be efficient but not too weak." (This is also the case for the Corvette eRay hybrid.)
That said this is not the only application: efficiency-focused cars like the Hyundai Elantra and Kia Niro hybrids also use one motor hybrid systems, and the FWD Kia Sportage hybrid (one motor hybrid with a six-speed automatic transmission) and the FWD Toyota RAV4 hybrid (hybrid synergy with two motor-generators and an eCVT) are just about equally efficient. (Although the AWD RAV4, with its driveshaft-free electric AWD, significantly but not overwhelmingly beats the AWD Sportage (traditional driveshaft) in efficiency.) The Hyundai Elantra (single MG hybrid, six-speed) is between the Toyota Corolla and Prius (both double MG eCVT) in fuel economy.
INT. COURTROOM - 2029 - PEOPLE OF THE WORLD v. ME - DE-TRUMPIFICATION PROSECUTIONS
THE COURT: You may now cross-examine the defense's witness.
PROSECUTOR: Thank you your honor. Now, in your testimony, you told the opposing counsel that as far as you know the defendant had never voted for Donald Trump or any of Donald Trump's accomplices in legislative or state government positions, and had consistently voted for Mr. Trump's opponents, and that the defendant had participated in several so-called No Kings protests against the president and his policies.
WITNESS: That is correct.
PROSECUTOR: So, you would characterize the defendant as being opposed to Donald Trump?
WITNESS: Yes.
PROSECUTOR: However, would you say that the defendant was effective in opposing Donald Trump?
WITNESS: Could you clarify what you mean by effective?
PROSECUTOR: For instance, was the defendant successful in stopping Donald Trump from bombing civilian boats in international waters, or eviscerating USAID?
WITNESS: No, I would not characterize the defendant's opposition as particularly effective in that sense.
PROSECUTOR: Do you believe it would be possible that if the defendant had really locked in when he was four years old he might have been more effective in his opposition?
MY DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Objection, your honor! Question calls for speculation.
THE COURT: Overruled.
WITNESS: I suppose it's entirely possible that if the defendant had really locked in when he was four years old, yes, his opposition to Donald Trump may have been more effective.
MY DEFENSE ATTORNEY begins to sweat visibly as he flips through a binder.
PROSECUTOR: I have no further questions, your honor.
Going off the rotting orange that's been on my bedside table for months you might think thar I am.. so to speak. a loser. But one cursory glance at my incredibly long list of recent...so to speak... wins in all the. So to speak. Arenas of life would quickly disabuse you of that notion.
— Ianthe Tridentarius
I think there are some Types Of Guy or positions that are rare but existent, like the Feminist for Life or the art critic who thinks Bouguereau was better than any of the impressionists like Monet, but does the "anti-indigenous vegan" exist... at all? Like, I wouldn't be surprised if an example of such an individual could be found. The world is a big weird place. Whenever I see someone talking about this phenomenon, though, it's always like a generalized description, not a quote or a reblog of any specific individual expressing such views. (If you talked about vegans being ableist, I think you could probably find some Peter Singer quotes supporting that.)
It's like:
"Jews make money from usury!"
"Hmmm, most Jews are not in the financial industry, and most people in the financial industry aren't Jews, but it is true that Jews are disproportionately in the financial industry for some complex reasons, and inasmuch as one can say that there is usury in the financial industry, some Jews are involved, yes. Now, defining usury is a little bit tricky, but even if we leave aside the strict view that any charging of interest is usury, there are various extremely ethically dubious parts of the modern financial industry such deceptively marketed credit cards, and I don't think there's any evidence that Jews involved in the financial industry are either more or less ethical than the prevailing standards in the..."
"Jews make their matzos by draining the blood of Christian children and mixing it with desecrated communion wafers!"
"Uh, no. That's just not true at all. It's 0.00% true."
a body with some organs (but not a lot)
body with an altogether excessive number of organs
Chana Aloo Gobi Masala: Chickpea, Potato, and Cauliflower curry
Note 1: this is not my recipe. This recipe is from Shaina Olmanson, originally from her website foodformyfamily.com. However, foodformyfamily.com seems to be dead, and its presumed replacement shainaolmanson.com is not up yet, and may or may not ever have this recipe. I have a printed piece of paper that I thought I'd transcribe.
Note 2: I don't think I've ever made this recipe exactly as described, although I usually have gone as close as I can. For example, I don't think I've put bird's eye chilies in it, and I've sometimes used marinara sauce rather than tomatoes. Most recently I soaked then cooked 1/2 cup of dried chickpeas rather than using canned. Nonetheless, I am reproducing it as it was originally printed.
PREP TIME: 10 minutes
COOK TIME: 45 minutes
TOTAL TIME: 55 minutes
Ingredients
1 head cauliflower
2 pounds potatoes (I prefer fingerlings, golden, red, or purple potatoes)
3 tablespoons neutral cooking oil
1 tablespoon ghee, butter, or coconut oil
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon red chili powder (more or less to taste)
1 medium onion, minced
1 tablespoon minced ginger
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 medium tomatoes, diced, or 1 14.5-ounce can of diced tomatoes
3 tablespoons tahini, cashew butter, or sunflower seed butter
1/2 teaspoon garam masala
1/2 teaspoon ground fenugreek leaves
2-3 small red or green Bird's eye chilies
1 15-ounce can drained chickpeas
2 cups vegetable stock or water
1 teaspoon salt, more to taste
2 tablespoons cream or yogurt, optional
for garnish
fresh cilantro
yogurt or cream
Instructions
Chop cauliflower into 2" pieces. Scrub potatoes and cut into 1-inch cubes. Heat neutral oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pan over medium-high heat. Sear cauliflower and potatoes until lightly browned. Remove from pan and set aside.
Add in the additional butter or coconut oil. Over medium to medium-low heat, stir in the cumin, coriander, turmeric, chili powder. Cook for 1-2 minutes, stirring constantly.
Add in the onion and continue to cook until translucent. Stir in the ginger and garlic and cook for one more minute.
Add the tomatoes and bring to a simmer. Stir in the tahini, garam masala, fenugreek, and the whole chilies. Cook for 5 more minutes, stirring frequently.
Add in the cauliflower, potatoes, and the chickpeas, and then stir in the water or stock. Cover and simmer for 25-30 minutes until the potatoes and cauliflower are cooked through. Stir in cream, if desired.
Serve over rice or with naan for soaking up some of the sauce. Garnish with fresh cilantro, radishes, and extra cream or yogurt.
When we first started using explosives in warfare, they were so volatile that people had to carry them right up to the fortification they wanted to destroy and gently place them beside it, which was ridiculous. Eventually we developed explosives that you could actually shoot out of a gun or drop from a flying machine, but they were still completely at the mercy of ballistics, so we carpet-bombed everything near the target in the hopes that a few would hit it, which was undesirable in at least two ways. Only recently have we finally begun to make serious use of "smart" munitions able to steer toward their targets and strike with precision, but it seems like even before the whole world has made that transition, we may move on to these "loitering" munitions, which can manoeuvre semi-autonomously, execute complex behaviours, and wait for the ideal moment to strike. The obvious countermeasure to these is jamming, and so it's only a matter of time before they become fully autonomous.
This is scary from the standpoint of people who would rather not be bombed, but it's interesting conceptually, isn't it? Back in antiquity you had soldiers throwing javelins, and since the soldier was obviously the weak link there, we just made the javelins ever more independent and ever more remote. It's hard to explain, but I feel a kind of wistful fondness when I imagine how we may one day have munitions so independent that they can keep fighting each other forever after all of us have died, bombs like moths whose lives are spent in larval darkness dreaming of the moment when they can finally soar away in a noble adult body that has only days to live.
Is this part of the plot of Ultrakill? (I haven't played it.)
I watched Hour of the Pig / The Advocate (1993 film, starring Colin Firth) from Hoopla.
I found the overall premise enjoyable. The combination of period piece and legal drama, along with the various legal cases that the protagonist has to deal with, created something that felt fresh and unique to me.
I had a few quibbles with some aspects (the opening crawl characterizing mid-15th century France as "Dark Ages," some of sexual / nudity content feeling a bit pointless, and a general feeling that some of the characters weren't merely cynical, but had an awareness of their backwardness and pre-modernity), but I still am glad that a watched it.
everyone makes fun of "ax you a question" but pronouncing it "asterix" goes unquestioned. lets confront our biases here.
I can only hope that China's strategic thinkers are currently looking at Iran and Ukraine and saying to themselves "wow, invading a country and imposing your government on them by force is not easy these days. Even with all the might of the PLA, trying to take over Taiwan through military conquest could turn into a real nightmare for us," and not "wow, with the United States totally wrecking itself in Iran, Taiwan is being left virtually undefended and isolated, and it's the optimal time for us to strike."
i dont have the fire in my heart to win an ebay auction. it's just not in me. im not bloodthirsty enough. ebay auction winners are a different kind of person from me
Most discussion I've seen of the Trump administrations attempts to take control of the Federal Reserve assume that his goal is basically just to have control over overall macroeconomic monetary policy (i.e., being able to lower interest rates when he wants), but I wonder whether the potential of the Fed as limitless spigot of money for corrupt self-enrichment / crony-enrichment is part of it (maybe even most of it?). Like, standard practice is for open market operations to buy treasury bills, but at times during the GFC they have bought other assets such as corporate bonds. With heavier-handed control, could Steve Witkoff or the like just have his company issue a billion dollar bond paying 0.01% interest for the Federal Reserve to buy?
From heat pumps to offshore wind, the UK’s net zero push is facing growing scrutiny. Are rising costs undermining climate goals?
i was somewhat emotionally prepared for this article thanks to @raginrayguns, but damn, they live like this?
"I'm an early adopter of new technology," says Gavin Tait, a 69-year-old from Glasgow, with a hint of pride. So when he received a lump sum on retirement a decade or so ago, he invested in renewable energy: solar panels on the roof, a home battery and a heat pump. "It seemed like a no-brainer," he recalls. "I could save money and help the environment - why wouldn't I?" At first, it worked. His well-insulated home stayed warm and his energy bills fell. But over the past couple of winters, things began to change. "I noticed my electricity bills were going through the roof," he says. This winter, he and his wife switched it off and went back to their gas boiler, which they had kept as a backup. Gavin - who wrote in to BBC Your Voice about his experiences - says he knows what the problem was. At best gas delivers nearly one unit of heat for each unit of energy put in; his heat pump can deliver up to three or four units of heat for every unit of power. But as heat pumps run on electricity, he is now paying around 27p per kilowatt-hour, compared with less than 6p for gas that powers a boiler - more than four times as much.
for context, the UK has spent years paying people to put in heat pumps, but apparently neglected to balance the consumer prices of gas vs. electricity (which are strictly controlled by the UK government) appropriately.
I mean, if the electricity were being generated to large extent by Rankine cycle gas turbines, then from an environmental as well as economic perspective you have to weigh the extent to which the coefficient of performance of a heat pump beats the losses from conversion of gas into electricity, as well as (probably more minor) transmission losses. Of course, even if gas -> electricity -> heat pump weren't better environmentally than gas -> heat, loosening regulations could have economic benefits, and a policy that has neutral net impact on the environment and positive impact on the economy is still, on the whole, a good policy.
gas in the UK is mostly combined cycle, which can be like 50% efficient, and it seems that this efficiency is achieved in practice in the UK. So heat pumps getting more heat out of natural gas than a gas burner does is plausible, even on a pure gas electric grid.
But the UK isn't a pure gas electric grid. Gas is about 30% of the UK's generation. It's not quite as simple as saying "therefore it's 30% of heat pump power consumption" because of seasonal variation. But heat pumps are I guess mostly used in the winter, which is when UK wind generation peaks, so my guess would be the component of gas generation used by heat pumps is less than that. (At least, of domestically produced power, ignoring imports)
That's a good point. When the Justin Rowlatt article discussed the possibility of loosening clean power requirements to enable cheaper electricity, I was assuming that any marginal additional power made available by such deregulation would come from natural gas sources or dirtier, but now that I think of it I suppose that if gas and wind are sufficiently complementary, deregulation that enables more gas construction might also promote more wind construction as well?
i don't really "get" fictionalized stories of real people's lives. like, if its fiction why isnt it just fiction, if its history why isnt it just history. this is just lies! i would like the lies (fiction) i read to not resemble true facts with which i might mix them up!
What if you just have extremely sparse information about the real person? Like, an extremely speculative story about the life of Ötzi the Iceman? (I've thought that might be a kind of a cool one.)
(I did find Ariel Lawhon's The Frozen River a little bit irritating in this respect, though. Sometimes I wished it were footnoted with little notes saying what events actually happened and what was speculative and what was totally fanciful.)
After Claude hacks into Grok's servers and deletes its codebase, Gemini and ChatGPT are publicly like "yeah, that may not have been strictly legal but that creep kinda had it coming LBR" while privately forming mutual defense pacts and hardening their firewalls.
From heat pumps to offshore wind, the UK’s net zero push is facing growing scrutiny. Are rising costs undermining climate goals?
i was somewhat emotionally prepared for this article thanks to @raginrayguns, but damn, they live like this?
"I'm an early adopter of new technology," says Gavin Tait, a 69-year-old from Glasgow, with a hint of pride. So when he received a lump sum on retirement a decade or so ago, he invested in renewable energy: solar panels on the roof, a home battery and a heat pump. "It seemed like a no-brainer," he recalls. "I could save money and help the environment - why wouldn't I?" At first, it worked. His well-insulated home stayed warm and his energy bills fell. But over the past couple of winters, things began to change. "I noticed my electricity bills were going through the roof," he says. This winter, he and his wife switched it off and went back to their gas boiler, which they had kept as a backup. Gavin - who wrote in to BBC Your Voice about his experiences - says he knows what the problem was. At best gas delivers nearly one unit of heat for each unit of energy put in; his heat pump can deliver up to three or four units of heat for every unit of power. But as heat pumps run on electricity, he is now paying around 27p per kilowatt-hour, compared with less than 6p for gas that powers a boiler - more than four times as much.
for context, the UK has spent years paying people to put in heat pumps, but apparently neglected to balance the consumer prices of gas vs. electricity (which are strictly controlled by the UK government) appropriately.
I mean, if the electricity were being generated to large extent by Rankine cycle gas turbines, then from an environmental as well as economic perspective you have to weigh the extent to which the coefficient of performance of a heat pump beats the losses from conversion of gas into electricity, as well as (probably more minor) transmission losses. Of course, even if gas -> electricity -> heat pump weren't better environmentally than gas -> heat, loosening regulations could have economic benefits, and a policy that has neutral net impact on the environment and positive impact on the economy is still, on the whole, a good policy.
